Monthly Archives: April 2013

This week’s story is from The Unreal and Real: Selected Stories Volume 2: Outer Space, Inner Landsby Ursula K. Le Guin, published by Small Beer Press. Outer Space, Inner Lands includes many of the best known Ursula K. Le Guin nonrealistic stories (such as “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” “Semley’s Necklace,” and “She Unnames Them”) which have shaped the way many readers see the world. She gives voice to the voiceless, hope to the outsider, and speaks truth to power—all the time maintaining her independence and sense of humor.

This week’s story is from Canary by Nancy Jo Cullen, published by Biblioasis. What has to die before you force yourself to change? That’s the question facing the always quirky and often-queer characters of Canary. From the communal showers of a hot yoga studio to seedy pubs on Vancouver’s East Side, from Catholic merchandise salesmen to hitchhiking teenage lesbians, the people and places of Nancy Jo Cullen’s debut are asphyxiating slowly on ordinary life. Yet in this joint-smoking urban underground, we also glimpse the families, communities, friends and strangers from whom unexpected kindness comes as a breath of fresh air. Trashy but poignant, comic and profound, Canary hangs luminous above the coal-heap of fiction debuts—and proves Nancy Jo Cullen a writer of astonishing depths.

This week’s story is from Half as Happyby Gregory Spatz, published by Engine Books. A grieving couple rents a desperate landlord’s house in an effort to recover lost intimacy. Twins are irrevocably separated by events both beyond and within their control. A nighttime prank and its gruesome aftermath forge human connections no one could have anticipated.

The eight stories in Half as Happy reveal with startling clarity their characters’ secrets, losses, and desires. Each with the depth of a novel, these insightful portraits of the darkness and light within us reverberate long after they’ve ended, like beautiful and disturbing dreams.

This week’s story is from If A Stranger Approaches Youby Laura Kasischke, published by Sarabande Books. In her first collection of short stories, Laura Kasischke exposes the dark heart of the domestic—it’s wrapped in shabby silk, tucked away in a dresser drawer. If A Stranger Approaches You reminds us that intersection of the bizarre and the quotidian is always at play. Memorial statues and raggedy dolls seem to come to life, a man listens to the electric menace of suburban power lines while he struggles with his failed marriage, and the little boy and his dog knocking on the door might be Death in disguise. Surreal and darkly comic, these are stories that know the unexpected graces and random collisions that drive and haunt us. As one of her narrators remarks, “What a thing, this life.”